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Don't get hacked ~ Tools - email receipts

Here's some email facts that explain why advertisers, companies, hackers and scammers LOVE emails.

· Worldwide email accounts are expected to reach 4.9 BILLION by the end of 2017. This is over half the world's population who open, read, download and BUY from emails.

· Emails are the second best way a consumer makes a purchase (a search is the first)

· The customer lifetime value (CLV) acquired through email is 12% higher than average.

· The average return on email marketing investment is $44.25 for every dollar spent.

· All email marketing techniques are copied by scammers and hackers

· A 10,000-computer botnet can pump out 50 billion spam emails per week.

The next few chapters will discuss tools and tricks we can use to make our email accounts safer.

Email trick #1

Deny email receipts

Okay, if we send an important email – say an application for a job – we might ask for a receipt to ensure the email we sent was actually opened, but the trouble is, some spammers do this to us. Corporations and online traders have been checking if we opened their email for years, by either asking for a receipt or putting trackers inside the email's images. If we open their mail, it shows them their subject line has been good enough to draw us in and check out what is inside. When spammers do it, there's usually a virus in an attachment or a worm hidden in a picture.

We don't really want this so we need to set up a deny receipts protocol. Spammers and scammers are looking for a confirmation that an email address is active. They buy lists of thousands of email addresses to try out their scams, but many of these addresses are dead, fake or inactive. By asking for a read receipt, they'll know the email address is genuine if it is accepted. ALWAYS refuse these requests, even if it's from a well-known corporation. If we accept them, we're just confirming the address is ripe for more spam. Most webmail services have a 'read receipt' setting in their messages section. Click the button or tick the box that says NEVER send a response to an email read receipt request. It may also be wise to disable automatic signatures in the messages section as scammers can use this or may glean more info about us this way. Likewise, an 'I am away on vacation' automatic message not only flags up our email address as active, if we've been socially engineered, we are at risk of being burgled.

We can do these tricks on most webmail accounts, depending on how safe they are. If we use an email client like Outlook we need to change the automatic response to read receipts:

1 On the Tools menu, click Options.
2 Click E-mail Options.
3 Click Tracking Options.
4 Click Deny a read receipt whenever one is requested

While we're on the topic of email receipts, there's another kind we should consider refusing: the store email receipt.

If you've never experienced it, stores can sometimes ask to send our receipt by email instead of giving us a paper one – if we give them our email address of course. Staff in some stores get upset if we say no to this but ignore them – especially if living in Europe where privacy laws are meant to be stricter. If we agree to an email receipt, over time they'll collect our online and offline shopping history, will send a barrage of their spam, their third party partners' will send spam, and we could get spam from ANYONE to whom they sell our email address. Some US companies have such sophisticated systems they can track a consenting email customer's movements right up to the store, especially if they have the store's app on their phone and haven't disabled location. Once inside, the store can even have the product the customer was viewing online ready for sale waiting at the cash register. GULP!

More tools next time